Silverchair

Press

12-11-2001

Silverchair's New Ballroom

By Greg Heller (rollingstone.com)

Band enlists Van Dyke Parks to lend hand on new sound, new albumRollingstone.com

Silverchair
have finished recording their fourth full-length album, and frontman
Daniel Johns arrived in Los Angeles on Wednesday to begin the mixing
process with producer David Bottrill (Tool, Peter Gabriel). The
follow-up to 1999's Neon Ballroom, was tracked at Sydney's Studio 301
in the band's native Australia, with producer Bottrill at the helm, a
choice that foretells an imminent expansion of the experimental ideas
suggested on Ballroom.

"Perhaps some people who've liked Silverchair in the past won't like
it," Johns says. "But hopefully some who've never liked the band
previously will love it. It's a lot more ambitious. Bigger risks are
being taken. What I think this album is and what everyone else is
telling me it is are two totally different things. I really don't have
much perspective. All I know is I'm incredibly enthusiastic about it,
and I've never felt this good about anything I've done in my life."

Fittingly for a band stretching out, Silverchair -- singer/guitarist
Daniel Johns, bassist Chris Joannou and drummer Ben Gillies -- layered
strings, horns and keys onto a handful of new tracks, many of which
Johns originally wrote on piano. To oversee the elaborate arrangements,
the band called on the legendary Van Dyke Parks, renowned for his work
with the Beach Boys (he co-wrote their famously aborted Smile album),
U2 and Randy Newman. Parks traveled Down Under to orchestrate three
songs for the boys -- tentatively titled "Tuna in the Brine," "Across
the Night," and "Love Your Life" -- and returned with praise to spare
for Johns and company.

"The music was filled with detail and invention and anecdotes and it
reminded me of the kind of ambition of Brian Wilson threw into his
schematic," Parks says. "I was very fascinated. I didn't expect to want
to do this work but I have learned so much from the experience. I
haven't had this much fun or been this excited by a sense of
exploration as well as opportunities for myself, in a long time."

"I'd never heard of him," Johns, twenty-two, confesses of Parks. "But
when we recorded the demos, I was discussing with my manager the types
of string arrangements I wanted for certain songs and he said to me,
'You are virtually describing Van Dyke Parks.' That was the first time
I'd heard his name."

The band has recorded a total of fourteen tracks for the record, but
Johns says they'll probably narrow it down to eleven come release time,
around March of next year. A first single is expected around Christmas.
Guests on the album include countrymen Jim Moginie of Midnight Oil
(Moginie also played on "Ballroom") and electronica whiz Paul Mac.

Thematically, Johns says to expect a polar shift from the more dour
material that populated Ballroom, i.e., the hit "Ana's Song (Open
Fire)," in which the singer detailed his own struggle with anorexia. "I
didn't want to write from a dark place anymore," Johns says. "A lot of
this one is focused on healing and being positive. I knew that the last
record had an emotional effect on people. I wanted to try and recreate
that effect only in a more positive way."

Johns sites the track "After All These Years" as an example of the less
gloomy direction. "It's a song I wrote to myself," he says. "I've
always been kind of scared of writing something happy 'cause it always
seemed cheesy, so as an experiment I sat down to try and write
something happy that wasn't corny. I did it in about fifteen or twenty
minutes. We recorded it as just me and a piano and a string
arrangement."

No firm tour plans have been laid out, but Silverchair have just
announced that, upon hearing of revamped security measures, they'll be
playing all dates of Australia and New Zealand's tenth annual Big Day
Out Festival tour alongside System of a Down, Garbage, New Order, the
Crystal Method, the Prodigy and others. Last year the tour was marred
by tragedy when one fan died and several others injured during Limp
Bizkit's set in Sydney. This year's BDO tour runs January 18th through
February 3rd. Save for two festival gigs in 2000, the shows will be
Silverchair's first since 1999.